


BBCSH 'Binary'  [R] 1/2

by tigersilver



Series: Falling [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, M/M, Rape/Non-con References, Triggery, What is not forgiveness but is?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:25:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigersilver/pseuds/tigersilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> 'There are worse things than dying, John, and one of them is living.' 'You think I don't know, Sherlock?'</p>
            </blockquote>





	BBCSH 'Binary'  [R] 1/2

Author: tigersilver  
Rating: R  
Pairing: S/J  
Word Count: 4,200  
Warnings/Summary: This was (is) extremely difficult to write, and there are triggers for rape, dub-con and non-con, drugs and so forth, so I beg your pardon in advance. Warnings specifically for post-rape aftermath and reaction, angst, splintered text fragments and very poor grammar/formatting, for I struggled to make this work for you, as I see it in my head. I may've failed, or perhaps I have not. You tell me, then, please? And this is all I can say in Summary:  'There are worse things than dying, John, and one of them is living.' 'You think I don't know, Sherlock?'

(Please forgive; the formatting, which is a very important part of this, was eaten by the import and no matter what I do to it, A03 is not taking my edits properly. To see the thing properly view it at my LJ.) 

 

* * *

 

Sherlock’s quiet as he can be, easing himself from the bed and making his way to the flat’s cramped loo.

His penis is sticky, flaked with dried ejaculate, a trace of waste, and blood. John’s blood and he would keep it as a badge of honour, a mark of (maybe, yes, right) shame, if he could, but John has always preferred Sherlock neat and snappy, sharp-edged and clean cut, so he isn’t allowed to keep them, those traces of John. [He wants to; it irks him, to let go of John particles to a simple warm washcloth, dampened with pedestrian water. Undeserving drains.]

Though he took them.

  
**[[He hears the water running in the loo, distantly, through a fog in his head.**   
**Sign of life, then; the alien rises once more and it’s earlier than expected. John’s in a bad horror story, isn’t he?**   
**Oi, Sherlock? Do you not stop, even now? What…what will you bring. Me…to me.]]**   


[He fancied himself a pirate, once, meant for the taking of things—clues, words, toys, tools, crumpets or whatever—and piracy was far more effective then wasting his precious time with unnecessarily distracting manners and platitudes; that’s all, full stop. That has always his elder brother’s bailiwick, and Sherlock didn’t begrudge him it, not at all. But he’s learnt since pirates may trespass unforgivably, and that manners are not always to be despised when discovered outside their useful—to his specific purposes—latitude.

And regret…it is horrible. Horrible. It fucking well scours his insides with acid. Unbearable. Make it stop?]

  
**[[Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock, and it defines his spaces, even as they are now, fragmentary: Sherlock.]]**   
**[[Dark thirty, even as dawn is rising.**   
**Darkness, spreading.**   
**Despite light across the blinds, not counting his being here.**   
**Dark.]]**   


He is not exactly a prize on the outside, though, even cursorily tidied. A dead wan face greets him in the loo mirror, the bruises beneath his eyes dark and purpling, casting the changeable hue to a shade of eerie dulled violet. His mouth is apparently now permanently cast down in set, soured and thin. There will be no smiles in John’s flat this fine morning anyway; it hardly matters.

[Sherlock only wishes he had a better, shinier, lovelier transport to show off to his good doctor.

He wishes—and wishes are foolish, they change nothing—he’d not been struck so. Bloody hypodermic; it’d been hardly noticable. Should’ve expected it, after The Woman; it’s how they operate, sneak, cheeky scum. Bloody Moran, may he rot in Hell, then. Throat gaping ripped over his exposed esophagus, done in by a jackknife; damn him to eternities of Hell, when Sherlock was through. Blood everywhere, but he’d washed that off his hands before coming…oh, coming. Right. He’d come straight to John, naturally enough. Should’ve waited, though. Should’ve waited. Bloody needle; what was in it? Later, then. Samples—there should be traces left. He’ll ask John to take a little draw—oh, right. Right. No.]

(It’s good to be in a proper frame of mind once more. It is not-good to be on this side of it. Before was good. None of this is good. Sherlock can’t see how it might be.)

**[[Sherlock, why even? And for me? My love, my own, my dead…body…Sherlock? Why, is it, you have done…this for me?]]**

One way or another, Sherlock must go out there.

It’s a battlefield.

Down then, and on his knees.

He’s down and on his knees before he even whispers (‘John?’), right there on the outer edge of the sitting room, where the lino stops and John’s current orbit begins. It suits—Sherlock should be low, snake-belly low, as John is not a tall man and John is sitting, and Sherlock full well understands this particular language, if no other. [He should do. Freak, alien. Don’t come here.]

[Low, low, as he feels it. It pains him to feel it. He is used to being tall. But…low. Low. For John’s sake. He’s a supplicant, and there’s an altar he’s desecrated.]

**[[Oh, god he cannot see this; John closes his eyes, tight shut. Closing, closing; he’ll not know, no, never.]]**

{Mycroft, again, and bloody sod off Mycroft. This is difficult enough without also Mycroft.}

…And thus he’s crawling once again; he’s never stopped, really, only just slowed up, faltering, and across the bland, tan, fibrously unattractive carpet meant to sustain heavy traffic. Needs a thorough hoovering; he’ll sneeze if he’s not careful—no, no, he cannot afford sneezing, not now. Don’t draw attention to himself, but also do. Do.

Knee, knee, hand, hand and his head well down, chin tucked, finding his way across a wasteland by tracking John’s telling breathing, for if he glances up—if he dares meet John’s eyes—there might be a message in them telling him to keep away. [For it also suits. This, for his John. He’ll do this, and gladly.]

  
**[[Clenched fist, cannot help it. Would like to hit, to strike out, to harm, but who is…who is?**   
**The one to harm? This one.]]**   
**Not to come. [He cannot go.]**   


{Please don’t say that.}

**[[To see him crawling.]]**

[It’s not all that easy as it looks, hand over hand, kneecaps rubbing friction into synthetic pile, and he aches from the inside out, it’s unbearable, really. So…so horrid. Appalling. Please don’t let me, is the refrain in his brain, oh, don’t let it, John, and that’s horrible too. Stop me now? Sherlock doesn’t even know what he’s not allowed, these days. (He was not allowed that.) Except it’s got to be a lot, and he recalls Henry, that wimpy little whey-faced bint-in-man’s clothing, and he recalls Moriarty, so…so much him, and that’s not—that’s not? Not him, not even now…but close. Boast-A-Lot? Close enough. Oh, god. Pathetic…oh, John?]

{And he can’t.} He cannot even, even for John. [He can’t look up; he daren’t. Don’t ask him to.]

_**~~Not stopping~~** _

**[[If only he could see him clearly, as it’s been so long…and so long…and long again. But he can’t quite…recall. He wants to recall. There was a way in, once.]]**

It’s all Sherlock can do to keep a clear head shuffling, even though most of the remnants of the drug Moran managed to jab into his upper arm are flushed down the toilet. Mostly. Water would help; he doesn’t have any. His arm stings still; his ribs ache yet, he’s a bit wobbly from lack of nourishment and some prolonged period of dehydration, but the worst thing by far would be for John to look at him as blankly as he’s been staring at the dusty blinds and the excess of sunshine flooding into the flat from behind them.

**[[Don’t come closer. But…do?]]**

Hours now. What’s meant by hours?

**[[Sherlock. Thinking about nothing and nothing is thinking, and John wishes he could stop it, but he cannot.**

  
**He thinks of his arse, jacked open by force, and then spit on a palm, and then Sherlock right up and it hurt, it hurt him. To the core, not expecting. Blood. Not…expecting.**   
**Not. What. He thought. No.]]**   


[If Sherlock had the patience to appreciate life’s little ironies, he’d be doing it, right this minute. But he doesn’t. Again—that would be Mycroft. Wrong sibling.]

John’s chair is the end-goal, and the lap of the man in it. If Sherlock makes that lap and lays his supplicant head in it, then…then…?

The journey ends too soon, and not soon enough.

**[[Head on his lap—nothing meant by it; he’s done this before, ever so long ago…But? What did he mean by it, Sherlock? What…did he mean? Now.]]**

[Oh, no matter. He’s meant to be coming here, in the end. Wasn’t he?]

Home. Sherlock lays his head there as soon as he may, with no nonsense about it. Locates it—home again, cheers—and is at rest, immediately, no hesitation.

**[[Sherlock! Sherlock? So…much and never like this. Sherlock, what is it you need from me. What is is it…you want.]]**

“I am.”

John’s two matched thighs are solid, and he has a tea-warmed mug resting at angle off to one side of one, and his other hand clenched into a tight fist laying atop the other, and there’s barely room there for any part of Sherlock but he still takes it, what there is of it, that small enough space. It is his—or it was, once. Theoretically. Prosaically—oh, he’ll claim it, in the cause of bravado.

“I want.”

(He cannot possibly do worse for himself…can he?)

[Oh, now this is it: heaven. He’s fanciful; it calls for fancy; he’s at home again. Fancy rules, even upend the laws of piracy, they. But there’s still the words—the worst of it all to move along through, with the words. He’s done ‘goodbyes’. Can he manage ‘hullo’s’ then? In these…circumstances? And apologies, how to manage those?]

“I…regret,” he starts again, immediately, gruffly [Sherlock desires deeply to manage those, the…] and only barely notes that John’s removed the fist and shifted the mug, he has his face cloaked so perfectly by his own trailing sleeve. “That I.”

**[[This is. This is. Apology? Now?]]**

Sherlock stops. John Watson inhales sharply—and says nothing. Nothing.

**[[No.]]**

“I…am…sorry?”

Sherlock swallows.

**[[Now?]]**

He’s not expecting to be doing this without an active audience; it stills him. His mouth is dry as dust but from some reason it’s also awash with the gush of sour-salt laden saliva (all but drowning the Words, no!) This is the same mouth that he has used to kiss John’s mouth with; it was once the same mouth he employed to dazzle and detail and declaim—and not only for John Watson, but for everyone he deemed not too tedious to bother with (but then again especially John Watson; and there’s that horrible twist in his chest, panging. His chest won’t stop with it; he should ask of John—angina? Early onset? Oh, please let John answer and in the old way…oh, please? He’s not ruined that, too?)

**[[One day, a miracle, and now this, and this is not a miracle, and yet, Sherlock’s here.]]**

He regrets, truly he does. Sherlock regrets. More now than ever. He regrets that the loss he is suffering is apparently both tactile and subjective; that his own loss is horrendous, that John’s loss is even more so, relatively speaking—that they’ve both killed a man, now, and both been scarred permanently. [What’s he done, in the kitchen? John would hate—John must hate?]

  
**[[There’s a resurrected dead crow on his doorstep, a Detective who defies all reality, and there must be—there must be?**   
**Someone, out there somewhere, to blame for this malfeasance, this staggering catastrophe….someone.**   
**Someone. He’d quite like to laugh. No laughing matter.]]**   


[He resonates with distress. What he’s done? He cannot even begin to comprehend what John is thinking of him, but it cannot be Good. There is so much Good he has lost, and not had, nor taken, these last years. John…John won’t like that. (Him.)]

**[[He’s not—he cannot be—Sherlock would never—but he…has. He has. His body says he…has.]]**

**[[Was that meant, or an accident, merely, Sherlock? What does this mean, oh Detective? …Tell me?]]**

[Sherlock has no regrets whatsoever Moran is no longer of the living. NO regrets at all; he’d have danced on the corpse if there’d been time enough for it. As it was he’d stumbled off, one great drive burning in the scope of his fuzzy mind, upper arm singing in that particular way. One room empty in the Palace, crying out. John—John.]

**[[In human-speak, _Sherlock_.]]**

Fire escape. Flimsy lock. John, in the kitchen, all unaware, till Sherlock makes him so. In all the wrong ways, there are so many. Oh, no, oh, yes, oh, god. Oh, no?

**[[Human. Like _me_.]]**

[That there are no angels, no take-backs and no erasures. He’s not, but he’s on their side—does John even know he said that once? John cannot know and he? He cannot blink, either; it’ll all spill out if he does. John—John?]

Words. Right. Those things. Measly, tedious, insufficient. [Burrow his head in a little farther till his temple bumps up against the lump of belt buckle and he can hear John’s stomach gurgling, and that’s lovely. That’s…better.]

**[[You touched me, invaded—took, raided. Why is it that you keep on trying to touch me, even now? Decency, Sherlock. Talk, damn it.]]**

“John, I do truly regret and am sorry—“

**[Inhalation. Exhale. Long and slow: torturous.]**

  
**[[What, now? What do you even want? What’s even left to give you?]]**   
**[[You taken it all, the heart out of me.]]**   


“I…have wanted so very much to approach you, it hurt me not to be—I?”

[Inhale only. Accelerated pulse rate. Sherlock’s fingers clutch and scrabble at those thighs—dear thighs.][Ram his head in to the lovely convex of middle-aged gut, where it’s warm and it’s his heartbeat come alive again.]

**[[Sherlock. I would.]]**

“You don’t have to forgive—I don’t expect you to forgive—it was a very bad thing I did.” He will talk yet more, speak aloud, this jumble. “I know that. Now.”

**[[Have.]]**

[Involuntary jerk of arm muscles; the tea sloshes. He’s so stiff, even when yielding, John Watson. Oh…John. No, please?]

**[[Sherlock! I…would, if I—]]**

“Now. I know.” He laughs, wildly, muffled. _Yes_ , he admits. Bit barking. _Not_ himself. There’s _nothing_ to laugh about. His very eyes are leaking, aren’t they? That’s unusual. “John, John?”

**[[Had known. ]]**

 

 


End file.
